You'd need a very big palette to copy these incredible computer images – they're created using 17 MILLION colours.

The artworks, which look like kids' splat paintings, were generated using software designed by Hungarian programmer József Fejes.

His beautiful results, called rainbow smoke, won him the top prize in a competition to make images with a different hue in every pixel – the tiny dots of colour displayed on a computer screen.

József’s program plots one colour then puts a similar colour next to it until the whole screen is filled.

In some pictures it works its way through all the variations of one colour – red, orange, yellow and so on – before moving on to the next one. In others it simply picks each colour at random.

József told New Scientist: "At first I didn't really know if it was going to end up looking beautiful or not, it was just an interesting programming challenge for me. I was very surprised at how beautiful it turned out to be.’'